Richmond, Virginia—On Thursday, January 31, at 8:30 am, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will ask a federal appeals court to find that the act of clicking on a URL or weblink isn’t sufficient evidence for law enforcement to get a warrant to search someone’s home.

The hearing involves a child pornography prosecution in which law enforcement obtained a warrant to search a defendant’s home based on the attempted connection to a URL (or weblink) by an IP address that was mapped to his computer. The URL led to a password-protected file-sharing service portal that the government maintains contained child pornography. The warrant application’s only connection to the defendant’s home was based solely on the attempted URL link, but included no information on how or why the defendant encountered the weblink, if he had any knowledge of what it linked to, or whether he ever accessed or downloaded the password-protected files.

EFF Criminal Defense Staff Attorney Stephanie Lacambra will argue that the mere fact that someone clicked on a weblink is not sufficient to support a search warrant. All of us have clicked on links without knowing where they would take us—or have gone to websites that were not what we were led to believe they were. Computers accessing the Internet make thousands of connections to URLs and connect with servers around the world often without any knowledge or input from the computer’s user. That’s just how the Internet works.

Lacambra will argue that in this case law enforcement could have, and should be required to obtain additional contextual information to justify a search warrant.

This article was first published on Lawfare. The most recent purportedly serious proposal by a Western government to force technology companies to provide access to the content of encrypted communications comes from Ian Levy and Crispin Robinson of the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the U.K.’s equivalent of...

You shouldn’t be convicted by secret evidence in a functional democracy. So when the government uses forensic software to investigate and build its case in a criminal prosecution, it should not hide that technological evidence from the defense. In an amicus brief filed today EFF urged the Ninth Circuit...

The Australian government has ignored the expertise of researchers, developers, major tech companies, and civil liberties organizations by charging forward with a disastrous proposal to undermine trust and security for technology users around the world. On September 10, the Australian government closed the window for receiving feedback about its ...

In the last few years, we’ve discovered just how much trust — whether we like it or not — we have all been obliged to place in modern technology. Third-party software, of unknown composition and security, runs on everything around us: from the phones we carry around, to the smart...

It’s not just the Department of Justice and the FBI that want to undermine your right to private communications and secure devices—some state lawmakers want to weaken encryption, too. In recent years, a couple of state legislatures introduced bills to restrict or outright ban encryption on smartphones and other devices...

A new bill introduced in Congress gets encryption right. The bipartisan Secure Data Act would stop any government agency or court order from forcing a company to build backdoors into encrypted devices and communications. This welcome piece of legislation reflects much of what the community of encryption researchers, scientists, developers...

Encryption is back in the headlines again, with government officials insisting that they still need to compromise our security via a backdoor for law enforcement. Opponents of encryption imagine that there is a “middle ground” approach that allows for strong encryption but with “exceptional access” for law enforcement. Government officials...